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Creating Sacred Space with Feng Shui - Revised text

Chapter 14 of Creating Sacred Space with Feng Shui was revised in 2002 as follows:

Geopathic Stress

Avoid It In The First Place

When you buy a car you are normally allowed to test drive it. Why do you not insist on sleeping a few nights in a house you propose to buy before you sign the contract?

These days it is no longer sufficient to have a house you are thinking of buying surveyed just for subsidence, damp, and the like. If you value your health and well-being, and you intend to live in that place for any length of time, have it checked for geopathic stress.

Pay particular attention to the areas where you are planning to put beds, desks, favourite armchairs and anywhere else you will spend more than four hours per day. Hiring a professional dowser is inexpensive compared to all the other expenses in buying a house, and could be the most vital outlay of them all. What, after all, is the point of living in your ideal home if it is going to wreck your physical and emotional health?

In Germany, where geopathic stress is taken very seriously indeed, dowsing is taken very seriously, some builders now offer certificates to guarantee that vital areas in new houses have been dowsed and are free of geopathic stress. It is interesting to note that in all the homes I have ever visited of people suffering with myalgic encephalomyelitis, they have geopathic stress lines crossing their bed, and for one reason or another, it has been impossible to move their bed to any position other than the one they have it in.

Gadgets

A quick trip around any alternative health exhibition will reveal a number of different products claiming to neutralize geopathic stress. Most of these are well-intentioned, but most are either ineffective or helpful only for a short period of time. Any devices installed always need to be checked periodically by dowsing to ensure they are still effective. One device developed by the Dulwich Health Society in the UK, which many people claim has been effective in neutralizing geopathic stress in their homes, is called the {ln:geopathic_stress 'Raditech}. It has to be plugged into an electric socket and yet uses no electricity at all except to illuminate the pilot light. One device is usually sufficient to treat the whole house.

Insulation

Plastic and cork are good insulators and can help to gain emergency, short-term relief from harmful earth rays. Spread plastic sheeting or untreated cork tiles between your box spring and your mattress. Depending on your sensitivity and the strength of the geopathic stress, the plastic sheeting will last a week or two before it needs replacing and the cork tiles a little longer. Note that if your bed frame is made of metal or your mattress has metal springs, and any part of it is in a geopathically stressed area, the metal will conduct the harmful radiation throughout the bed. For this and many other reasons, wooden beds and natural cotton mattresses are a far better choice.

Earth Acupuncture

Some practitioners hammer lengths of copper piping, iron rods, or wooden wands into the ground at points where the rays enter a building. It works as if by magic. Within hours the geopathic stress has vanished. Now, I'm willing to concede that in the case of toxic underground streams a great adept could bring neutralizing forces to bear that would be effective at least for a while. I'm also willing to concede that in the case of earth lines it is possible to divert them by this method. But both scenarios have dubious integrity. They smack of humans playing God with these great forces of Nature and take no account of where the energies are being diverted to (probably to your neighbour's house!). Just imagine the cumulative effect of hundreds of earth acupuncturists around the world making a small adjustment here and a small adjustment there. Imagine this continues for a hundred years and what do you have? Total chaos in Nature!

I confess I used to recommend this method sometimes. However, I never practised it myself. The results were great results but something about it never felt quite right. Now I'm totally opposed to it and speak out about it whenever I can.

Feng shui & space clearing

Some feng shui practitioners and dowsers believe that it is building our buildings without regard for the geomancy (energy flows) of the land that has brought about such an increase in geopathic stress in Western countries in recent decades, causing natural earth rays to become harmful to human life. Another possibility is that the human immune system has been so weakened by modern living that these earth rays now damage our health. I tend to feel it is a combination of both.

In some cases, space clearing and correcting the flow of energies using feng shui helps to alleviate geopathic stress to some degree, depending on the consciousness and skill of the practitioner. However, this is not a cure. The only long-term remedy I ever recommend is to remove oneself from the vicinity of the stress (move your bed, move your chair, or in an extreme case, move house). One of the long-term aims of my work is to educate architects to design buildings that actually support people's health rather than endanger it.

Other methods of 'healing' geopathic stress

As the incidence of geopathic stress in our environment increases many new teachers are emerging with techniques that claim to be a cure-all. I greet them all with a healthy dose of scepticism and encourage you to do the same.